Stock photography used to cost hundreds of dollars per image.
Then Unsplash happened.
In 2013, a small Montreal startup couldn't afford stock photos for their website. So they shot their own and posted 10 of them on Tumblr, free to use, no strings attached. They went viral. 30,000 downloads in 24 hours.
That Tumblr became Unsplash, which now has 8 million images donated by 400,000 photographers from around the world. No attribution required. No watermarks. No license fees. No subscription. No catch.
Download anything. Use it for anything. Commercial, personal, whatever. The community decided to give their work away, and the result is the best free photo library on the internet.
The quality is the thing. These aren't the stiff, fake-smile, two-people-shaking-hands-in-front-of-a-laptop corporate stock photos. They're real photographs. Moody street scenes. Landscapes that look like paintings. Architecture. Food. People who look like people.
Search by subject, mood, or color. Filter by orientation. The results are consistently beautiful.
8 billion images have been downloaded from Unsplash. That means somewhere out there, 8 billion things exist with a photo from this collection in them.
Go take something.